I Beg Your Parton

Since when do Cadbury do Internet?!

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 04:54:00 -0800

An internet made of chocolate? Now that's something I could get down with!

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HashBang.TV Episode 3: Hack Days Are Dead, Long Live Hack Days!

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:46:00 -0800

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Technorati setup - please ignore

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:45:00 -0800

8U6R7TTDYAMG

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HashBang.TV Episode 2: Jo Rabin, MoMo London

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:50:00 -0800

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BlueVia: Mobile World Congress, China, Brazil, Evernote and Wikimedia. Wow!

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:13:00 -0800

I try not to write too much about BlueVia on my personal blog, as you can read that stuff here on the BlueVia blog.

However sometimes there is some awesome stuff going on that I just need to share!

As we head towards the madness of Mobile World Congress, I'm excited to tell you that BlueVia is hosting an intimate event with China Unicom, where you can learn how to enter the Chinese market, and get some insight into what types of apps Chinese consumers are downloading from the China Unicom Wo Store.

Tickets are super limited (in fact at the time of writing only 4 are left) so sign up quickly!

You can sign up here: Selling Your Apps in China

Spin the globe from China to Latin America, and we arrive in Brazil. News breaking today is BlueVia is partnering with Evernote and Wikimedia to run a social inclusion hack in Brazil in the Spring. More information and sign up here.

If you are attending MWC, check out my whereabouts on my Plancast feed. It would be great to meet and chat.

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HashBang.TV Episode 1

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:43:00 -0800

So I mentioned my new personal project for 2012.

Well here is our first episode for your visual delight. I'd be really interested in your feedback. Hopefully we will improve a little every time we do it!

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The Application Developers Alliance - 2,300 sign ups in first 3 weeks

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:42:00 -0800

Yesterday I had a call with Jake Ward to understand the detail behind the recent announcement of the Application Developers Alliance which I covered in this blog post.

Jake clarified the purpose and mission of the organisation, and answered a few of the questions I posed.

Firstly, and importantly, it is a not for profit organisation. The idea came from the lack of representation of developers in the industry. Research was conducted before setting it up, “We have talked to a lot of developers” Jake confirmed.

Individual membership is free at the moment, and when fees are introduced it will be a nominal amount ~$25 > $50.

They are looking to attract developers of all platforms, and Jake told me they have already signed up 2,300 members in the first three weeks, with 500 – 700 of these being outside of the USA. Reporting a really positive reaction, largely due to being a not for profit, it is clear they are not trying to make money off developers.

These interest levels have promoted the Application Developers Alliance to undertake international activity sooner than planned. Their first non-US foray will be at the upcoming Blackberry DevCon in Amsterdam.

Clearly this answers one of the key questions from my original post - this will be an international organisation, and the discounts on services (like Rackspace hosting) will apply to any member regardless of location.

Jake seemed especially excited by the networking tool within the Alliance, describing it as “a LinkedIn for Developers” This will allow members to find skills to hire into their projects, and connect them with clients.

We discussed at length the “herding cats” metaphor, and Jake agreed that there is no one size fits all solution to address the developer community, emphasising they want the organisation to be open and collaborative to ensure it serves member needs.

This is re-enforced by the decision that the board will have developers sitting directly on it.

So, things look to be off to a fast start. I’ll keep you updated on further developments.

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A new project for 2012: HashBang.TV

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 03:59:00 -0800

So, this new project has been in the pipeline for a while.

Its a web TV show focused on the exploding UK software development and startup scene. I co-host with Chris Book. We have already pulled together an awesome team of supporters to help us put out the show, and hopefully it will get better as we build up our experience of being in front of camera!

The idea and inspiration for the show is covered in this post on the new HashBang.TV site.

It feels very strange watching it back, like being naked in public! Still, the preview show and show notes are now live.

Whats the best way to learn to swim? Jump in the deep end and see what happens, so we will be doing our learning in public.

Hope you enjoy.

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TMIG: Shoestrings and Straight Lines - event wrap up #cimtmig

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:20:00 -0800

So last night saw the third TMIG seminar in London at the BPP Business School.

We had a great turn out of over 70 technology marketers.

Named “Shoestring and straight lines”, we planned the evening to be two constraining halves. Based on the feedback we had on the night I think we successfully achieved that goal.

The first half of the evening was “Shoestrings”. The inspiration of this theme was two fold. Many marketers are facing cuts to their budget due to the economic downturn, therefore what tools and techniques can marketers use to cut through with lower spend. The second stimulus was from the work I do day to day with smaller technology start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Many of these companies do not have anyone with a marketing job title, no formal marketing training, and actually no marketing budget at all. What tips and insights can we as professional marketers learn from these companies at the cutting edge of digital, viral and gorilla marketing? (buzz word bingo alert!)

Shoe strings was introduced by Steve Revill followed by a panel made up of a blend of practicing technology marketers. These were Hermione Taylor, Julia Shalet, Justin Bowser, Mark Evans, and Thibaut Rouffineau.

See the full gallery on Posterous

After a very lively Q&A session with the audience, we broke for refreshments and networking.

The second half was “Straight Lines”, delivered by Alan Moore. A fascinating talk built around the theme of his latest book which you can buy here.

You could tell the audience was totally engaged as it took a brief amount of time for the audience to respond to Allan opening up to Q&A. If the rest of you were like me, my brain was still trying to process the enormous amount of thought provoking information I’d just been given. Thankfully, the Q&A soon warmed up, and again we had a vibrant set of questions. What was even coolier was the audience were asking and answering questions between themselves across the room. The sure sign of an event and subject matter that had struck a cord.

So that’s three events down for TMIG. All the feedback I had on the night was overwhelmingly positive, but let me know if you have suggestions on what we can do better. You can review the tweets from last night by searching for hashtag #CIMTMIG – I’ve included a couple below:

Clapometer conclusive- seems to havebeen a successful event! Congrats to all on @CIMTMIG board and those behind the scenes #CIMTMIG
— Steve Revill (@steve_revill) January 18, 2012

Great CIM seminar Shoestrings & No Strings. Thx to organisers & speakers :) #CIMTMIG @Steve_revill @alansmlxl @jewl
— MrBRtist(@MrBRtist) January 18, 2012

I’ll quickly repeat my plea from last night to get involved and help out. Like all CIM MIGs, TMIG is entirely run by volunteers on top of their day jobs. Anyone that can spare some time to help would be warmly welcomed.

If you are interested, please get in touch with myself or CIM directly.

To end, a final thanks to Steve, our awesome guests, CIM and the TMIG board for making the event such a success.

Find us at our Linked In Group or official CIM TMIG page.

Till next time,

James

Chair of TMIG

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Redefining Action Hero: Bill Gates is Better Than Batman (Infographic)

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:57:00 -0800

Source: frugaldad.com

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Bad news for Turntable.FM as Facebook launch collaborative music listening

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:25:00 -0800

Long time readers will remember that I raved about Turntable.FM last summer. It truly changed my music consumption habits within a week.

Of course the music industry quickly identified it as a threat, rather than a solution to solve their fucked business model, and forced Turntable.FM to block all traffic from the US. As I wrote at the time, these actions are pointless as it is easy to spoof a US IP address. Still the hassle eroded the group I was regularly DJ'ing with and my usage dropped off to near zero.

What a huge missed opportunity.

I've been keeping tabs on Turntable.FM's attempts to secure the licensing they need to re-open to non US customers, but so far silence.

Then the news I'm sure they were dreading. Facebook announced on Thursday that they were launching "Listen with" which basically does exactly what Turntable.FM does, except of course you are locked into the Facebook platform.

The blog post says it is rolling out now, and I assume that Facebook have enough lawyers, muscle and money to make the music labels play nice. Its amusing reading the comments on the blog post praising Facebook for coming up with such a cool idea.

Whilst writing this post I checked in on Turntable.FM for any news and the site was down. I'm not sure if that was scheduled maintenance, or coincidence, but their Twitter account hasn't posted for 48 hours either. There is no mention of the Facebook announcement in their stream.

I can hear the biting of lips in New York from here.

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Rapportive: Bringing your social graph directly into to your inbox

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:07:00 -0800

My latest piece for ITProPortal is now live.

Its my take on Rapportive, a social plug in for GMail.

Herding Cats. The Application Developers Alliance – a trade body for an amorphous blob!

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:24:00 -0800

Interesting news ahead of CES. The concept of a trade association for app developers has surfaced again.

Jon Potter, formerly of the Digital Media Association, will launch the Application Developers Alliance at the CES trade show. He references the lack of organization within the developer community, and the need to bring it together.

It seems the Application Developers Alliance will aim to offer members the pretty standard array of trade association benefits – member networking, business match making, discounted services and industry lobbying.

The announcement has got pretty good pick up in the tech blogosphere, and there is speculation that RIM and Google may be involved. A positive start.

Frustratingly there is scant further information. It looks like its in stealth mode at the moment, the Application Developers Alliance website link was broken when I tried it,but there is an operational Twitter account @AppsAlliance. I have messaged Jon via Linked In, so I will report back.

I’m assuming the concept has been heavily researched with developers to get this far, so the thing I’m most interested in is the insight behind the need for a trade association, the reaction from developers, and their willingness to pay.

The concept of a single addressable “developer community” is an urban myth. Developers hang in tribes around particular languages, platforms, operating systems, or beliefs. Rather than being singularly addressable, they are by definition completely fragmented. Each individual tribe requires specific attention, knowledge and understanding of its particular needs. So far I've not come across a one size fits all solution. Trying to figure all this out, is both the challenge and appeal of working in developer marketing.

During the first year of BlueVia I have been open that our goal was primarily to raise awareness. Therefore the team attended over 100 events in 2011 and we spoke to pretty much everyone that would listen. The pure marketer in me wasn’t comfortable with this less than precise method, but it worked. We were also in startup mode, and there was not the time to attempt to develop a sophisticated segmentation model of the community ahead of launch. We did kinda try, but quickly discovered there was nothing out there we could use as a framework, it would all have to be from scratch.

That changed into the second half of 2011. Since then we have been working hard on creating our own segmentation of the community, which will allow us to identify much more precisely who would benefit the most from BlueVia.

However, it hasn’t been an easy piece of work to deliver. This is why I’m so keen to hear from Jon on the approach for the Application Developers Alliance.

If you accept that generic messages to the developer community will not work, then you have to be much more targeted in the way you tailor your proposition to individual developers.

Below is just a small sample of the categorisation attributes we identified and considered during our segmentation work

Technology – perhaps the simplest approach is clustering around the developers preferred development platform – iOS, HTML5, Android, Ruby, .Net, Java, etc. This is relatively easy but risks missing the nuances of their actual needs and drivers.
Organization type – is the developer an independent, a startup, in academia, an agency, a charity, an enterprise? Each situation brings its own set of needs and approaches
Business Model – is the developer seeking to generate direct revenue from app sales, advertising, text messaging, in app billing or are they seeking to grow audience and market share, are they an open source developer, or a little of everything?
Geography – another myth is apps are global. There are very few Facebook’s and FourSquare’s out there. Understanding the regional dynamics of technology, business, and competitive conditions is vital. I hope the Application Developers Alliance is intending to be an international body, and not just focused on the USA.
Industry Vertical – is the developing producing apps or services for a particular vertical like games, financial services, energy, health, retail, etc

As you can see, the number of possibilities can quickly multiply, especially if you look to combine these to create a rich persona.

Patrick Mork floated the idea of an app trade body back in August 2011. I will have to reach out to him to see where that went, and if he is aware of Application Developers Alliance. The Mobile Entertainment Forum (disclaimer: I’m a board member) has also spent considerable time trying to figure out how it can become more relevant to independent developers, recognizing the huge contribution they collectively make to the mobile content and commerce industry.

So news of the Application Developers Alliance is welcome, but it faces some interesting hurdles. I’d love to analyze the detail, and understand exactly what kinds of developer Jon is intending to sign up. Its well documented that many developers are very negative towards marketing activities, even if its pushing something that directly benefits them. It will be fascinating to see how the Application Developers Alliance is pitched to them.

What do you think? Do developers need a trade body and will they sign up?

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Cool FourSquare 2011 Milestones INFOGRAPHIC

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:16:00 -0800

via blog.foursquare.com

From the FourSquare blog.

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SAR Measurement Infographic by Tawkon #mobile

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:54:00 -0800

0 0 1 32 189 Telefonica 1 1 220 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA HE

Source: tawkon, November 2011. Check out tawkon, including the latest release which now supports most Android devices. Download the app here.

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Happy 19th birthday to Text Messaging [INFOGRAPHIC] #mobile #yam

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 08:30:00 -0800

Source: Tatango SMS Marketing

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Foursquare Black Friday data [INFOGRAPHIC] #4sq #apple #yam

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:29:00 -0800

OK, so Black Friday is an American retail tradition, but below is an interesting infographic from FourSquare which plots the retail therapy madness.

NOTE: jump on the American bandwagon, this Friday Apple will be offering discounts and free shipping in the UK as well, more here.

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New TMIG Event Announced #marketing #technology #cim #yam

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 01:23:00 -0800

I'm pleased to announce the next major gathering of the CIM Technology Marketing Interest Group has been confirmed for the 18th January 2012 in London.

Our inaugural event in January of this year was a huge success, attracting nearly 100 key people from the business of creating and marketing technology. You can watch highlights of the first event on the TMIG TV You Tube channel. This second event promises to offer further insights and inspiration.

The theme of our second event is how do tech marketers make sense of a non-linear world? Our main speaker is Alan Moore, author of 'No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world'.

Straight line marketing is out. Today's interactive networked world is about the massive flow of people, who are connecting, collaborating, organising and creating in a manner that has nothing much to do with a linear approach. But how do tech marketers achieve business and commercial success in this non-linear world? Alan will be revealing his 'no straight lines' perspective on innovation, communities and participatory culture to give your business the edge it needs.

In addition to Alan we will have a high quality panel of marketers working in the start up field, who are operating at the coal face of the 'no straight lines' scenario.

The first 30 tickets to the event are free, and you can find more information and booking instructions here.

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Think its information overload now? By 2015, the projection is 8 zettabytes! [INFOGRAPHIC] #web #social #marketing #yam

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:28:00 -0800

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I Beg Your Parton

Since when do Cadbury do Internet?!

HashBang.TV Episode 3: Hack Days Are Dead, Long Live Hack Days!

Tag Cloud of my last 4 years of listening on Last.FM

Technorati setup - please ignore

HashBang.TV Episode 2: Jo Rabin, MoMo London

BlueVia: Mobile World Congress, China, Brazil, Evernote and Wikimedia. Wow!

HashBang.TV Episode 1

The Application Developers Alliance - 2,300 sign ups in first 3 weeks

A new project for 2012: HashBang.TV

TMIG: Shoestrings and Straight Lines - event wrap up #cimtmig

Redefining Action Hero: Bill Gates is Better Than Batman (Infographic)

Bad news for Turntable.FM as Facebook launch collaborative music listening

Rapportive: Bringing your social graph directly into to your inbox

Herding Cats. The Application Developers Alliance – a trade body for an amorphous blob!

Cool FourSquare 2011 Milestones INFOGRAPHIC

SAR Measurement Infographic by Tawkon #mobile

Happy 19th birthday to Text Messaging [INFOGRAPHIC] #mobile #yam

Foursquare Black Friday data [INFOGRAPHIC] #4sq #apple #yam

New TMIG Event Announced #marketing #technology #cim #yam

Think its information overload now? By 2015, the projection is 8 zettabytes! [INFOGRAPHIC] #web #social #marketing #yam